15. Nick
NICK
She’s gone.
I don’t know how I was able to sleep through her leaving but I know she left before I open my eyes.
It’s the way the weight on the mattress has shifted.
The lack of warmth on her side of the bed.
It’s cool over there, where her body should be.
The room is quiet in the wrong way. It’s not the quiet of someone sleeping, but the quiet of absence.
My thigh screams when I suddenly sit up, head snapping around. The bathroom door is open, the light’s off. I can see from here the room is empty.
My eyes go to the dresser, because of course, that’s where I left the keys to the car.
Keys that are now gone.
“Son of a bitch.”
I’m on my feet before the words finish leaving my mouth, ignoring the fire in my leg, scanning for confirmation of what I already know. Her shoes are gone. The whiskey bottle’s on the nightstand, half-empty now. The closet is open, and the jacket she was wearing is missing.
She left. She actually left.
I press both hands against the dresser and lean into them, my head bowed, breathing through the rush of something that isn’t quite anger and isn’t quite grief. It exists somewhere in the middle. A hot, sick feeling in my chest that tastes like failure and feels like a door sliding shut.
I didn’t cuff her, goddammit. I made a conscious choice not to restrain her last night, because something in me believed, after everything we’ve been through, she wouldn’t run.
After the cabin and the attack, the car chase, then the tracker; something stupid and hopelessly optimistic that shouldn’t exist wanted to honestly believe she would stay.
The woman who fought beside me. Who let me cut a device out of her back with a pocketknife and kissed me like she meant it. I wanted to believe that same woman wouldn’t wait for me to fall asleep and disappear into the night.
What a fucking fool I am.
I should’ve known better. Hell, I do know better.
This is who she is. Not Laura. Not the girl who curled against my side and fell asleep listening to my heartbeat.
This is Ivy. The trained operative who sees trust as a vulnerability and intimacy as a tool.
I gave her an opening, and she took it. It’s exactly what I would’ve done in her position.
That doesn’t mean it hurts any less.
It’s going to hurt a hell of a lot more before Liam flat-out kills me. After everything, I had her, and I let her walk out the door because I thought one night meant something.
I’m pulling on my boots when the door handle turns. I freeze, staring, watching the door swing open as she walks in carrying two cups of coffee and a small brown paper bag.
When she sees me, she stops. I’m standing in the middle of the room, one boot on, one boot off.
Phone in hand. Wearing an expression that probably looks exactly as wrecked as I feel.
Her eyes move from my face to the phone to the boot and back to my face before something moves in her expression.
It’s not quite amusement, and it’s not quite guilt.
“You thought I left,” she murmurs.
I don’t trust my voice. I settle for setting my phone down on the dresser and staring at her.
“There’s a coffee shop down the road—we passed it on the way here, remember?
” She sets the cardboard carrier on the dresser next to my phone and takes out one of the cups.
“The coffee in the room looked terrible. They had food, too, so I got a couple of muffins and some scones, too. They looked too good to resist.”
She pulls out what looks like a blueberry muffin before sitting on the foot of the bed and crossing her legs. She then takes a sip of her coffee like she didn’t just take ten years off my life.
I pick up my cup and take a big gulp. It’s excellent, though even if it wasn’t, it would taste that way. I guess relief has something to do with it.
“I thought about it,” she admits after a moment in a calm, matter-of-fact voice. She’s a woman who’s thought something through and come out on the other side. “After you fell asleep last night. The keys were right there, waiting for me. I had the angel on one shoulder, the devil on the other.”
I’m glad this all seems funny to her. It didn’t feel so funny from where I’m standing. “Why didn’t you?” I ask, because I have to.
Now she’s quiet, staring into her cup before breaking off a piece of muffin, popping it into her mouth, and chewing slowly.
She looks a hell of a lot better than I expected this morning after everything she drank yesterday, but then again, she could be used to it.
Hard drinking and being able to keep a calm head afterward could have been one of the many lessons drilled into her, and it would be easy to understand why.
One never knows when the situation will call for sitting down with a bottle of whiskey before pulling off a job.
Finally, she breaks the silence. “Running means starting over alone. I’ve been alone for the last twelve years. I just didn’t know it until a few days ago.”
She looks at me, and her green eyes are clearer than I’ve seen them since Prague. Still sharp and focused, yes, but without the hostility. There’s still a wall between us, but that wall has a door in it now. Cracked open, just enough. “I’m tired of being alone.”
My hands are still trembling when I sit down next to her. I wrap them around the coffee cup to hide it, though I think she notices and pretends not to.
“So,” she continues, straightening up, all business again. Whatever vulnerability she just showed has already been folded up and tucked away, stored somewhere I can’t reach. “What are we doing next?”
“About?”
“About everything. Vincenzo’s not going to stop.
With or without a tracker, he won’t leave a loose end.
I know too much about his operation, his network, his people.
I know every safe house and every asset he’s run through Europe in the past five years.
That’s not the kind of information he can afford to have walking around in someone else’s head. ”
She’s right. The clinical way she lays it out, through an assassin’s perspective, treating herself as a liability to be neutralized, makes my stomach clench.
“First things first,” I decide, forcing myself through a bite of muffin, which quickly turns into a second, bigger bite because this thing is damn good. “I need to talk to Liam.”
She watches me pick up my phone and pull up his contact. The fact that he answers on the second ring tells me he’s been waiting. These days, he’s always waiting.
“Where are you?” His voice is clipped, intense. The voice of a man who’s been running scenarios in his head all night and is only waiting to find out which one turned out to be true.
“South. New location. We had company yesterday.” I give him the rundown—the diner, the tattooed man, the car chase, the truck in the ditch. With every detail, his silence gets heavier. I can hear him absorbing it before trying to process it.
Once he has, there’s only one question. “How did they find you?”
I look at Ivy, who probably hears his side of the conversation and is choosing to pay close attention to one of the two cinnamon scones she bought. “A tracker. Implanted in her back. I found it and cut it out once we got far enough away from the crash to cover our tracks.”
His voice is heavy, edged with anger. “I should’ve thought of that. Goddammit.”
“We both should have, but it’s done now. She’s clean.”
“And the guys from the diner? You’re sure they didn’t live through the crash?”
The memory of that ugly crash repeats in my head.
The crunch of metal, the shattering of glass.
The smoke that rose from the wreckage afterward.
“I don’t know how anyone could’ve lived through that,” I tell him.
“The car looked like somebody took a can opener to it by the time it was all done. Even if they had lived, there wouldn’t have been any way to question them. They wouldn’t have been conscious.”
“So Vincenzo sent his own personal guard to do what his mercenaries couldn’t,” Liam concludes. “He’s escalating.”
“Yeah, he is. That’s why I need you to do something.” I glance her way. She’s given up any pretense of not listening in, her body very still as she concentrates every shred of herself. “I need you to set up a meeting with Gabriel.” Her eyes widen.
Liam is quiet for a long moment. “Gabriel Russo.”
“He’s the one who told us she was alive. He pointed me in her direction. I doubt it was because his father asked him to. Gabriel has his own agenda.”
“And you think he’ll help us?” The disbelief is heavy in his voice, to put it mildly.
“I think he already has. He gave us Laura.” I ignore the way the woman next to me flinches.
I guess that’s better than her correcting me…
or hitting me. “That wasn’t an accident.
We’re part of whatever game he’s playing with Vincenzo now.
I’d rather know what that game is than keep reacting blindly. ”
More silence. I can almost hear him thinking, which is always dangerous. “I’ll reach out,” he decides. “It’ll take time. The guy doesn’t exactly advertise his phone number.”
“Use the channels we used before. He’ll respond. He wants this conversation as much as we do.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because his dad just sent his personal guard to kill his own asset. If Gabriel gave us Laura, he’s making a move against his father. He needs allies. So do we.”
Liam heaves a sigh, but I recognize the sound. He hates the idea, but he sees the sense in it, meaning he has to let go of his pride long enough to admit he doesn’t always have all the answers. “I’ll set it up,” he announces. “Where should I tell him?”
“Somewhere neutral. Somewhere his father can’t reach. I’ll leave the details to you.”
“Fine. What are you going to do in the meantime?”